updated 02:15 pm EST, Tue January 10, 2012

LG Display gives us a glimpse of future products

LG Display (LGD) offered us a personal look into their future products at CES and we came away quite impressed with what we saw. OLED, particularly White Organic Light Emitting Diode (WOLED) is what the supplier is betting on for its future flagship displays as part of a mission to become the industry leader in displays. There are numerous reasons but chief among them is performance and price and how they relate to each other specifically.

We also got a close look at the 55-inch OLED TV LG launched earlier in the day at its press conference and were smitten. Color reproduction was incredibly stunning in 2D mode, with vibrant reproduction. Blacks were indistingishable from the piano black bezel as well. The 3D images when wearing the glasses were also impressive, nearly forcing us to duck when a baseball came flying out of the screen. The set is rumored to cost around $8,000 when it launches, which hasn't yet been revealed.

LG Display's 3D products use the company's FPR (Film-type Patterned Retarder) technology that's been adopted in customer LG's 3D Cinema displays. We were shown the 60-, 72-, and 84-inch displays that will be out later in 2012 and their performance was nothing short of amazing, with the relatively large size of the pixels in the 72-inch model putting it at a very close third behind the other two sizes.

For smartphones and tablets, the tech of choice is AH-IPS (Advanced High-performance-In-Plane Switching) for the display mainly due to its color-correct reproduction of camera input. With a number of prototypes on hand, along with what's currently out on the market to compare, it was an eye-opening to get a sneak peak at what's coming down the pipeline. Numbers are often thrown around and we got more than we could crunch during our stay, but they don't tell the story of how featherlight and pamphlet-thin a tablet can feel in your hands. The size and weight are thanks to LGD's prototype Cirrus panel that is said to offer the narrowset bezel thickness of any tablet in the world, decreasing the current best by 36 percent, while allowing the tablet it's housed in to be 12 percent skinnier and 23 percent lighter.

To clearly illustrate its point, LGD had a number of displays comparing the heat generation and power consumption characteristics of OLED versus its AH-IPS mobile device panels. For these comparisons, see the images embedded below.

The effort LGD has gone through to was painfully obvious. While numbers are boring -- and there were plenty of them -- the experience was undeniably impressive. Granted, these were somewhat ideal conditions, and there wasn't the usual CES traffic and distractions around. But when you can't distinguish the line between where the black bezel ends and the actual screen starts when it's reproducing black colors, that's a sure sign of a high-end TV.

LG Display 55-inch OLED

60-, 72-, 84-inch FPR panels

Tablet prototype with Cirrus display

Prototype Cirrus-display tablet on the right compared to Galaxy Tab 10 on the left

Are the labels correct?

Re-read the article

I had to, but when you do so it becomes clear that LG is pushing OLED for TVs and AH-IPS for camera-centric devices. So for smartphones and tablets, it makes sense that the company is showing that AH-IPS is better than OLED. For the larger screens, they apparently have a different process to offset the natural bluer tendencies of OLED.